Sharing
By Julie Schlosser

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Twelve months ago, peer-to-peer (P2P) technology was the next new thing; three months ago it was called passe. But the flameout of one particular high-profile company (read Napster) has overshadowed more than 100 startups that are forging ahead on collaborative P2P technology, which turns your desktop PC into a server that directly shares data with other PCs. Raytheon and Ford have recently begun using P2P tools. In April, Intel launched a cancer research initiative built on P2P. Gartner Group predicts that by 2003, 30% of all U.S. corporations will experiment with peer-to-peer. "There are some companies here doing some really interesting things," says P2P guru Clay Shirky of Accelerator Group. Here are three of the most promising:

OpenCola: The company's just-released Swarmcast software speeds up document sharing. Say you want to download Destiny's Child's "Bootylicious" (we're not advocating pirating music, of course). Swarmcast's software creates a network of people downloading the tune and splits the song into tiny nuggets. You receive the song, superfast, as an amalgamation of bites from other "Bootylicious" files being downloaded at the same time. The company has secured $15.7 million in funding and is working with Microsoft's .NET group.

XDegrees: On the Internet, it is "pretty easy to find things," says CEO Michael Tanne. "The same isn't true in the enterprise. It doesn't have a good system to share information." To help people across a corporate network find the digital data they need, the ten-month-old Mountain View, Calif., outfit has developed software that assigns URLs to Word files, video clips, and other documents. Think Google, but for the workplace.

NextPage: The Lehi, Utah, firm has created a platform, NXT 3, that allows corporate users to connect disparate servers. NXT 3 enables workers to locate documents on others' PCs. Law firm Baker & McKenzie, for example, uses it so that attorneys in the firm's 61 offices can access files on one another's hard drives and collaborate on briefs. The two-year-old NextPage has $36.5 million in funding and--get this--more than 150 customers.

--Julie Schlosser